Nationality: United StatesExecutive summary: Samantha on Sex and the City

Kim Cattrall is best known as the slutty Samantha on Sex and the City. She studied drama at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, at Canada's Banff School of Fine Arts, and at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. She made her film debut in Otto Preminger's next-to-last but undoubtedly worst film, Rosebud with Peter O'Toole. Her second film was the weird farm-gang drama Deadly Harvest with Clint Walker.

Cattrall was featured in the original Porky's, and starred in the original Police Academy, opposite Steve Guttenberg. She had the title role in Mannequin, the memorable uncomedy about a window figurine that comes to alleged life to fulfill Andrew McCarthy's fantasies. She starred with John Savage in the wretched thriller Where Truth Lies, and with Tom Hanks in the godawful Bonfire of the Vanities. Among her entanglements with monsters, she starred with Craig T. Nelson in the cheesy TV monster movie Creature, with Casper Van Dien in the sucky Modern Vampires, and she faced the intergalactic tyrant Robby Benson in a sci-fi catastrophe called City Limits. She also starred with Kathleen Turner and Christopher Lloyd in the stupefying Baby Geniuses, played Britney Spears' mother in the abysmal Crossroads, and she was Michelle Trachtenberg's skating coach in the saccharine-sweetened Ice Princess.

Among her rare watchable roles, Cattrall played a crusading lawyer in Big Trouble in Little China with Kurt Russell, she was the traitorous Vulcan Valeris in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and she had a featured part in Kathryn Bigelow's sultry mini-series Wild Palms.

Cattrall capitalized on her fame from Sex and the City by writing a sex manual, Satisfaction: The Art of the Female Orgasm. Her husband was co-author for the book, but they separated shortly after its publication.

Appears in articles:Newsweek, 23-Feb-2004, DETAILS: Facing Life After 'Sex' -- Kim Cattrall saved her best for last on HBO's beloved, departing hit. Now comes the hard part, starting over (p.58, two pages), BYLINE: Allison Samuels